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Keyboard Shortcuts

This semester I have been using Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 to do my video editing. I must admit that I am very new to the editing process; I had no experience with this sort of thing before the start of this year. Last semester I found Final Cut Pro to be very overwhelming so I decided to use a simpler software called Wondershare, since we didn’t do a huge amount of editing in semester one I managed to get away with it. This semester however was a whole different matter; we were tasked with shooting our own fiction and nonfiction films and obviously editing them afterwards. I realised soon enough that Wondershare was just not going to cut it. While the software was fine for simple editing I knew that for editing a film project I had to upgrade.

I decided to go with Adobe Premiere Pro as Paul mentioned that RMIT was going to be switching from using Final Cut primarily to using Adobe. At first I was completely in the dark and feeling very overwhelmed, however after watching Silvi work with the software (as she was very familiar with Premiere Pro) I started to pick it up and feel more comfortable with what I was doing.

Admittedly I’ve never really been a big user of keyboard shortcuts; I have never really bothered to learn them before and usually I simply just do things the long way. However I did find a few of the shortcuts on Premiere Pro to be very helpful and time saving. There’s the obvious and probably most used short cut:

Ctrl + C = copy (or Cmd + C on a mac) and then Ctrl + V = paste (Cmd + V on a mac), this common short cut came in very handy during editing as it’s a lot easier to simply copy a clip of footage and paste it onto the timeline when you need it again, rather than having to go through the entire clip again and find the place where you need the footage from (one of our clips from the Burger Off rally was 40 minutes long! Needless to say going through it to find the exact bit of footage you wanted was a little painful).

Ctrl + S = save (Cmd + S on mac) was another helpful shortcut, although Premiere Pro auto-saves itself for you which is also very helpful in case your computer should crash or some other disaster should occur.

There are some additional shortcuts I didn’t utilise yet I think would have been extremely helpful and I plan to use in the future.

Ctrl + Z = undo (Cmd + Z on mac) I think would come in very handy in the future, there were many times when I made a small error that I needed to get rid of or added an effect I wasn’t happy with afterwards, and instead of going into the menu each time to delete it I think it would be much more time efficient to simply use this shortcut. I will definitely keep this in mind for the future as editing is a process of layering and trying new things out.

Another shortcut I think will be valuable in the future is Ctrl + N (Cmd + N for mac) which creates a new sequence in your project. We used many sequences in our projects this year, for our Non Fiction project Silvi and I made 5 different video clips and it was much easier to simply create these all in different sequences rather than use a different project file altogether, that way you can easily switch between sequences to work on different clips quickly, rather than having to open a new project which takes a minute or so with Premiere Pro. It also came in handy for editing rough cuts, instead of editing in the finalised rough cut sequence it was good to create new one to edit our work in so that if we were unhappy with the new changes we made we could always go back to the initial rough cut. Considering how many new sequences we made across both projects I think this would be a very handy shortcut to utilise.